Forget all the gimmicks, it's drivers dicing with death that sells F1

Ian Wooldridge

Last updated at 00:00 30 October 2002

BY THE end of the Formula One season, Michael Schumacher's smirking smile was as familiar as the Mona Lisa's. And usually, grinning like the sorcerer's apprentice at his shoulder to anoint him with another shameful wastage of good champagne, was Rubens Barrichello.

Already, the red- uniformed Ferrari technicians and mechanics had embraced them as though they had just returned from a twoyear expedition to Mars. Then followed the German and Italian national anthems and the increasingly boring post-race televised Press conferences.

Let's unreservedly hand it to Ferrari. Of the 17 grands prix, Schumacher won 11, Barrichello won three and on six occasions Barrichello came second to Schumacher. Supreme engineering, superb driving.

The only problem was that the fortnightly deja vu threatened to be the death knell of Formula One.

By August, despite the high decibel efforts of ITV and BBC Radio Five Live commentators to convince us that we were watching the mechanised equivalent of the chariot race from Ben Hur, thousands of once devoted fans had defected to the greater thrill of mowing their lawns or taking their kids to the zoo.

'Well,' said Bernie Ecclestone, ringmaster of the whole caboosh as he walked into Monday's crisis meeting in London, 'sport is like that. Look at that Tiger Woods, he wins everything at golf.' Utterly wrong, of course. Woods is unquestionably the finest golfer in the world, but even if he starts birdie, eagle, birdie in a championship, there are at least a dozen golfers in the world who can beat him on the day. There are probably another 10 who can fluke past him.

Not so with Schumacher this season. With a magnificent flying machine beneath him, he was usually 2.4 seconds ahead by the second lap and the race was already over barring crashes, mechanical failures or pit stop foul-ups.

How Murray Walker, whose autobiography sales are soaring way ahead of Les Horizontales, must thank his stars that he got out before it became so predictably boring.

So the crisis talks started this week: how to get this terrific sport back on track with public, television and sponsors.

I can tell them in a paragraph how to do it. It is to restore the dramatic danger that attended big motor racing 30 years ago when drivers died like flies. Five were killed in a single season. The idea was drummed into my head by the late, great James Hunt on a car journey down from Mount Fuji, where he had just won the World Championship, to Tokyo in 1976 in blinding rain and horrendous driving conditions.

'Why I am paid so much' - and it was pocket money compared to what even mediocre drivers earn these days - 'is that they come to see me killed.'

James had had a drink or two, but in Vino, there was terrible veritas.

Millions of motor sport fans will deny it but in those days there was a magnetic vicariousness, as there has always been in bull fighting, about the sport.

Jackie Stewart, thrice world champion, did more than any other driver in the world to demand the safety restrictions that diminished the death toll and it was reassuring this week to hear that he and Stirling Moss, now both knights of the realm as well as knights of the road, resist any such nonsensical gimmickry as handicapping Ferrari by tying sacks of potatoes to their exhaust pipes.

Instead, Monday's conference tinkered with some Friday and Saturday qualifying procedures that may or may not deprive Ferrari, Schumacher and Barrichello of their almost inevitable positions on either the front or second rows of the grid.

I recognise that the Saturday qualifying session is, or was, a lucrative bonus for television and its advertisers but that, too, has become as boring as the grands prix themselves. Absolutely nothing happens in the first 45 minutes of the allotted hour and then there is still the familiar line-up in the first few rows.

As one who cannot distinguish a carburettor from a back axle, I have no qualification for entering into this argument, but for millions like me who enjoy the skill and bravery of these drivers, is there not one simple solution?

Widen the tracks to allow overtaking at speed and then, as in horse racing, draw for position and the starting post.

What's it all about anyway?

Ferrari, at the moment, are supreme but does their domination on grand prix circuits enhance their car sales in Britain, where, in most conurbations, one is reduced to 8mph and on the open motorway, you're risking it if you touch 80.

I think not. Ms Patricia Hewitt, the back- end- of-a-bus minister who reckons that large-chested ladies posing with very little on over BMW bonnets do not sell cars, may just have got it wrong.

i.wooldridge@dailymail.co.uk

Luke's display was more than a village bash

IT MAY have escaped your attention that during England's mildly embarrassing opening match against Western Australia, a considerable amount of damage was inflicted by a young man named Luke Ronchi.

As wicket-keeper, he caught Nasser Hussain, John Crawley, Alec Stewart and Ashley Giles in England's only innings and then flayed a fast 34 not out.

And where did this 21-year-old Australian gain his experience?

None other than playing for my little Hampshire hamlet of Bashley, whose football team's heroics I have also frequently extolled here, probably to the boredom of many.

Ronchi first played for them at 18.

Last season, he won his league's batting award with 725 runs.

All this reflects well on a tiny community which, a few years ago, had one petrol pump, more cars than inhabitants, no pub and neither cricket nor football club. Indeed, I unilaterally proclaim Bashley as Britain's Premier Sporting Village.

Monty's major breakthrough

IT IS so good to have seen Colin Montgomerie, Britain's finest golfer since Nick Faldo, rejoin the human race.

He is a different man after his brilliance during Europe's triumph in the Ryder Cup at The Belfry. Pray to God he retains his humour.

His newly-released book, The Real Monty, explains the trauma he went through while he was putting golf above his family life. His marriage was on the precipice.

In an interview on Radio Five Live, a phone-in speaker congratulated him on winning a major, which Monty, in golfing terms, has yet to win.

'The major is for rejoining your family and getting back with your wife,' said the caller.

Monty recalled this conversation on Monday night at the launch of his autobiography in London.

'That man was right,' he said, 'I have won a major.'

MCC don't warrant a pardon

LAST week, I received a copy of FF8282's latest book, A Prison Diary.

It is dedicated 'to Foul-Weather Friends'.

While acknowledging that it was Jeffrey Archer's own foolishness that led him to his imprisonment, I remain one of many.

It is why we regard the Marylebone Cricket Club's decision to suspend his membership for seven years as the astonishing, pompous and vindictive action of a self-enrolled kangaroo court.

Astonishing because I know three powerful members of the MCC committee who were dead against it.

They realised it may well backfire. How many tabloid sleuths are already rummaging around the reputations of MCC's other 18,000 members whose deviations from the straight and narrow may deserve similar suspension of membership or even expulsion?